Hariz Halilovich, Places of Pain. Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-Local Identities in Bosnian War-Torn Communities

As a consequence of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995), approximately 2.2 million men, women, and children were forced to flee their homes. The memory of this conflict and its subsequent displacements immediately evoke the terms ‘ethnic violence’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’. In Places of Pain, the social anthropologist Hariz Halilovich, examining the process of forced migration in Bosnia and Herzegovina, goes beyond a mere focus on ethnic identities. He studies Bosnian identities as multiple and regional; the forced displacements, he maintains, cannot be generalized or made unambiguous in relation to popular memory or translocal identities.

In researching the impact, diversity, and consequences of forced displacement, Halilovich followed displaced Bosnians to the many places they live today: not only Bosnia-Herzegovina but also Austria, Australia, Germany, Sweden, and the United States. Through the study of displaced persons in these countries, Halilovich nurtures his central thesis that ‘displaced groups from Bosnia and Herzegovina primarily follow the patterns that are local rather than national, transnational or even ethnic and religious’ (10). He convincingly shows how displaced Bosnians are concerned with (re)constructing their local rather than their national communities and identities. These local Bosnian communities are tied together by their dialects and they are often multi-ethnic. Halilovich even characterizes his book as an ‘homage to and celebration of that multicultural Bosnia’ (5). He introduces the concept of zavičaj, which could be translated as ‘local homeland’, to argue that translocalism complements transnationalism.

Halilovich takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey. Most chapters are structured according to geography and discuss Bosnian narratives in one or several regions from across the world. The first chapter, for instance, discusses the eastern Bosnian village of Klotjevac; the second looks at former refugees now settled in Austria. The book also includes chapters written from the perspectives of commemorative culture and of gender. Moreover, the author provides an interlude with photographs from different places, showing some of the displaced persons he portrays in his text. The chapter on translocal diasporic communities in Australia, Sweden, Germany, and the US forms, to my mind, the heart of the book. Although Halilovich focuses primarily on Bosnians in Australia, he convincingly demonstrates the ways in which Bosnian families that were forced to live abroad (re)constructed their local identities. For instance, the Brčko club in Melbourne defines itself as an exclusively ‘local’, multiethnic, and apolitical organisation of former residents of that town. ‘Brčaci need each other not only to socialise in the present but also to remember and be remembered for who they once were and still imagine themselves to be’ (141).

Halilovich’s emphasis on Australia is rooted in his personal background. Although he left Srebrenica before the genocide took place, it left a profound imprint on his life. He fled Sarajevo as a student in 1993 and decided to emigrate to Australia in 1998. Halilovich currently works at Monash University in Melbourne. His background, as he aptly notes, makes him a cultural insider as well as a professional outsider. He refers to this type of subjective academic methodology as ‘reflexive ethnography’ (13).

He, however, also relies on other theories and methodologies, such as those of the social anthropologist George Marcus and his writings on places. Halilovich considers ‘place’ to be a factor that contributes to people’s identities and to be a concept that is never fixed or static. Furthermore, he refers to the Foucauldian term ‘popular memory’. For example, he shows how the popular memories of survivors of the Prijedor and Srebrenica massacres now living in St. Louis, Missouri, have even become part of an official commemoration, initiated in 2005. In sum, most of Halilovich’s findings derive from personal stories collected in interviews and related sources. While he might have problematized his methodological approach somewhat more clearly, his main argument is easily comprehensible even to someone who has no profound knowledge of ethnographic methods.

The bottom-up perspective in particular makes Places of Pain an interesting and moving read. Halilovich employs many Bosnian words to describe local habits and traditions; he also includes a great variety of personal stories and anecdotes about forced displacement. Through these testimonies he accesses broader developments. While this approach does not provide a comprehensive overview of the conflict and its consequences, it conveys its diverse—often horrifying—impact and consequences in different places. Sejo, for example, one of the interviewees, now works as a nurse in Austria, but had been a student when his village was raided and ethnically cleansed by Serb militias. Nowadays, a quarter of a century after his forced exodus, he is still searching for the remains of his father among Bosnian mass graves.

Halilovich’s personal commitment to the transformed places in Bosnia and to the displaced persons he interviewed is of great value to his book. At the same time, precisely because of this involvement, he may have produced a too nostalgic, indeed too rosy image of multicultural eastern Bosnian villages before the war. And in the last chapter, where the author seeks to underline yet again the diversity of forced displacement, he suddenly switches to a gender perspective. Although the chapter incorporates insights from the previous chapters in an interesting manner, its sudden, exclusive focus on women comes across as an abrupt shift. Perhaps it would have been more effective to have integrated insights about gender with the conceptual approach taken in the other chapters.

Ever drawn to testimony, Halilovich introduces three new personal stories even in the book’s conclusion. He might have included these accounts earlier, which would have improved the structure of the book. By adding them at the end, he returns once more to his most pervasive theme: the immense diversity of displaced persons and their life stories. In Halilovich’s words: ‘what emerges from the heterogeneity and diversity of the performative enactments of memories and identities is a distinct pattern, a common point of reference’ (231)—namely, the ubiquitous infl uence of translocalism.